Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs. Such scaling down has also increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed.
One advancement implemented as technology nodes shrink, in some IC designs, has been the replacement of the typically polysilicon gate electrode with a metal gate electrode to improve device performance with the decreased feature sizes. Although existing methods of fabricating IC devices have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects. For example, challenges rise in cutting a metal electrode line into sub-metal electrode lines.